Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 36: I-35W Mississippi River Bridge Collapse

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

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We're doing good. Yes. Can that be the cold open, actually? Can I do that? Well, I just started recording. I made an executive decision. Fly, Eagles, fly, on the road to victory. Fly, Eagles, fly, score a touchdown. One, two, one, two, three. Hit them low, hit them high and watch our Eagles fly. Fly, Eagles, fly, on the road to victory.

E-A-G-L-E-S, Eagles. Let's see how it goes. That's a tasteful way to introduce our episode today. Yeah, hello and welcome to Well There's Your Philadelphia, Eagles. Yes, it is notable for beating the Minnesota Vikings. And now a team without a defense, but it's fine. It's fine. We don't need safeties and we're going. Welcome to Well There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters and it has slides, which so that is a visual aspect so you can see things visually with your eyes. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. Zencast are still recording me at like half volume, which is great. But audition is fine. So we will burn that bridge when we get to it. Oh, maybe I should use that metaphor.

Oh, you think that's the most tasteless thing you didn't see the drop. I just downloaded. I'm Alice Coldwell Kelly, my pronouns are she and her. I'm also on a podcast called Trash Future. It's very good. You should listen to that. I will ambush you with the tasteless drop at a time of my choosing. All right.

How do you? I am Liam Anderson. I am at Oldman Anderson on Twitter. My pronouns are he, him and I said, OK, let's go. Yeah. OK. So what you're seeing on the screen in front of you is a bridge. Well, actually, two bridges because there's one bridge way in the back there. What's happened to that one in the foreground?

It's like a bridge in a half. Is it a pontoon bridge? No. Oh, it is not today. We're going to talk about the Interstate 35 West bridge collapse back in 2007. Oh, I did want to mention, though, two days ago, we got an email on the on the on our Patreon email or a foolish problem email from some guys specifically requesting this.

So this one's for you. Sorry about your dumb football team. Yes. So is that, you know, for some reason, I saw this picture and my gaze was immediately drawn to the single solitary folding chair down here. Oh, that's sad. And never been a time to pop a squat. I know.

All right. But before we talk about the bridge, we're going to do the goddamn news. Yeah, not very good. Unfortunately, all of the Miami Marlins have coronavirus now. Yeah, baseball. We regret to announce you that baseball has died. And the Phillies still managed to drop two of three to a team that's basically a literal leper colony.

So I am convinced at this point that coronavirus in its asymptomatic form confers on you superhuman baseball prowess. The Red Sox performance was horrible. That was a disgrace on the top of the point. She's like, I don't even fucking watch this game against the fucking Mets. Oh, my God. The Mets meet the Mets step right up and greet the Mets. Yeah, no, they did.

They laid down for them like a dog. I know, right? Fucking Sox. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Like you get you get really good at baseball when you get COVID and then you die. That's why we have to expand the bubble until eventually

like every professional athlete and every sport in America is within the bubble. And has coronavirus. Well, I think about it this way. If you make the bubble big enough, everyone will be in it and no one will get coronavirus. Stephen King's the dome as applied to like virology. Dude, it'd be great to be in the fucking dome right now. You could like you would have no worries about coronavirus. Yeah.

The dome. Yeah. In additional news, Elon Musk says he's going to coup whoever the hell he wants. Yeah. I'm like sarcasm. It's that. It was an epic. He was doing epic trophies when he said that.

So it's fine. I can't imagine having that much fucking money and still like like I've said this to someone in passing, like if I had the kind of money that Elon Musk had, I would never see me again. You never would. You never would. I would fuck off to an island. Not Jeffrey. You have scenes kind of violent.

I would fuck off. I'm just like, then a good kind of island. I would fuck off to an island with no firearms restrictions and I would ride a TV's and I would get CTE at 31 years old and I would be perfectly happy and I would die 40 and I would leave all my money to my cats or whatever and I wouldn't be on fucking twitter.com. I can tell you that you wouldn't be on Twitter posting like it was Reddit and doing a bit of like trolling where you would when you say something like our pronouns, they're bad and then your fucking girlfriend who you just had a kid with has to like call you out.

Oh my God. That is so embarrassing. Maybe I know this isn't you. Like I'm not very sympathetic to Grimes considering she named her kid after the A12, which she said was like whatever good in battle, but like very stealthy, even the fact that it was not a fucking fighter craft and it was a prototype to boot. But like, can you imagine having to fucking log on and be like, all right, sweetie, like that's it. Time to yank the plug.

We got to do damage control. We've got a like former union for like Grimes and Kim Kardashian for like having to reign in their two successful boyfriends who just like I just have got brain rot from being too wealthy. Good. I'm like, I'm more sympathetic to Kanye because like I know as a manic episode when I seize it, like even so, man, just log off, please just like you live in Wyoming. Just call it.

Yeah, just just log off for a while. But this is the thing. None of us will ever log off. Twitter is a curse. It's actually even worse for you if you have money because I don't know. You just like don't have the aura of invincibility anymore because like leftist thought 69 420 can reply to you and be like, yes, suck my deck actually, which is good, but it will drive you insane.

But wait, Kanye West lives in Wyoming. He has a ranch in Cody, Wyoming. Yes. Damn. I wonder if you like he just hangs out in his board with Warren Buffett all day. I said Warren Buffett's Montana. Right. Yeah.

Wasn't Ted, Ted Turner, Wyoming? Yeah, Ted Turner is all of it. I can't imagine like, I can't imagine living in those places. Like it just seems like it's too far away from anything. You know, you have a ranch and it's a million square miles and you have one dollar for every one of your million square miles. We have a thousand dollars for every one of your million square miles. Well, it's like the joke about the American rancher talking to the British

farmer and the American ranchers like, yeah, I've got so much land that I get up in the morning, I get in my truck, I drive and breaks down. I drive and breaks down. It runs out of gas. I drive, I break down, I run out of gas. I do that over like three days and I'm still not at my property line. And the British guys like, yeah, I had a truck like that ones. Well, I guess, I guess Elon Musk saying he can coo anyone to get lithium is good

for his stocks. You know, yeah, that's true. That's, that's, that's, I think that's what this is. You know, if he gets enough, if he like has, if Tesla has positive, like a positive share price for, I think four straight quarters, it gets into the, the index funds and the standards and pause. And so he makes a bunch of money off of that. So yeah, cool.

Yeah, that'll do it. Oh my God. Can you imagine if Elon Musk orchestrated an actual coup? Like if he were the guy planning it, right? This is the strongest argument against like the Elon Musk did a lithium coup thing is like, imagine if Elon Musk planned that shit. Yeah, the rivals plastic just melts. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a bunch of people with the boring company flamethrower that's just a blowtorch and like they roll up in Teslas and the door falls off. It's an armored Cybertruck. I haven't seen you two or three times above, buddy, get a new car. I'm begging you. Oh God. All right.

So that was the goddamn news. Okay. Hey, it's East Enders. Yes. So, uh, no. Who was that? Do you have like an owl sissy ringtone? No, it's that wasn't though.

Fantastic. All right. So in order to learn about the I-35 West Bridge collapse, we had to first ask what is I-35 West? First. Yes. Um, it's an interstate highway that goes through Minneapolis, right? Right around, I think it goes down here.

You know, this is your regular old urban freeway, right? Ripped through a bunch of neighborhoods in the early 1960s. You know, it takes thousands of acres of taxable land off the city's books and displaces a couple of thousand people, dumps thousands of cars onto clogged streets, clogged city streets every day. It pollutes a whole bunch. It looks ugly. It doesn't work very well at moving people.

So on and so forth, right? You know, look at how big, look at how much land is used for interchanges. Right? You know, it's like right next to downtown Minneapolis. This is what you get for downloading your interchanges off of the workshop instead of just making your own. Red Bull Highway after the Red Bull Division from World War Two, which is at least kind of interesting.

I thought it was the energy. It doesn't follow interstate naming conventions, which pisses me off because it was like grandfathered in, which I hate. Oh yeah. Cause I 35 West goes through the Minneapolis and I 35 East goes through St. Paul. Yeah. That makes sense.

Twin cities, twin freeways and just like, yeah, beautiful. It's just like why trench of concrete that makes your city much worse. So part of building this freeway involved bridging the mighty Mississippi River. Although they're way up in Minneapolis. So the Mississippi River is a lot less mighty right here, right? You know, this is the upper end of where it's navigable, right? Right after like this lock here. There's basically, I think it goes up a couple of miles and then it stops.

With my brain genius knowledge of American geography, I didn't know the Mississippi went that far north. Like I don't know whether hell I thought it started, but I didn't think it got up as far as Minnesota. Oh, yeah, it just keeps going. Keeps going all the way up. It starts in Hudson Bay. Actually, no, it doesn't.

Like a TASCA, a TISCA, whatever. So it's getting mad at me at the comments for it. Huh, as it keeps going up, isn't isn't the Standing Rock Reservation right on the banks of the Mississippi or is that the Missouri? I don't know, neither. Welcome to the podcast where we know about things. Yeah, but you know, this is again, this is the top end of where it's navigable right here at St.

Anthony Falls. Uh, they St. Tony. I'm doing miracles over here. You know, named for the guy who helps you find your keys. Forget about it. Anyway, but yeah, so they had to build this bridge. So when they built the freeway, they did. They built this bridge.

It's called the I-35 West Mississippi River Bridge. It never had a special name. It's just what they called it. They didn't even like name it after like some local hero. It's sad. No, they have no heroes up there. I believe it is in the Missouri River, by the way. Certainly not with that football team.

Fucking name it after Prince Jesus. I don't think they could name it after Prince because it was 1967 when this Oh, well, yeah, that's your problem. Also like it probably like cost a lot of money to change the signs to that symbol. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they had to get permission. So let's let's start by getting an idea of how this bridge works, right?

Let's go to the NTSB report. Well, it holds up a thing and then like people drive over the top of it. Is my understanding. I've played poly bridge. Yes. Yes. So this particular bridge combination of two types of structures, right? So from about here to about here, right?

And here to here. It's what's called a deck girder bridge, right? Which is just there's some big steel beams. You put some concrete on top. Bada bing, bada boom. You're done. In the middle. Yeah.

In the middle. The problem with this bridge is that it was two Italian American. Is that what we're going with this? Just two Italian in a Norwegian society. Yeah. And the middle is a deck truss, right? Which means there's, you know, there's a deck where the car is driving underneath. There's a truss, right?

Okay. You make a bunch of triangles. Triangles are strong. Yeah. This particular type is a Warren truss because the triangles alternate like this, right? Oh, it's not because it shaped like a snake. Big structural bridge. Yeah.

Oh, God. So, so, okay. And what we're going to focus on is the deck truss portion, right? Because this is where the stuff happens, right? So how does this, how does this work? How does this put together? Well, to learn about that, we're going to do some beam theory. Oh, no.

Yes. Oh, no. This is worse than organic chemistry. Oh, yeah. There's lines. There's letters. Yes. There's more than one letter.

If your math uses a letter above like, I don't know, D, I have instantly lost interest. All right. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about what we call Euler-Bernoulli beam theory, right? This is one of the basic things they teach you in statics, right? So start out with, let's sort of define what we have here. We have, we have a beam up here, right? And we see the two types of connections to the ground. This is a fixed connection, which is like a hinge, or excuse me, this is a, this is a pin connection, which is like a hinge.

This is called a roller here. And then over here, we have a fixed connection, right? So your pin, you know, lets this beam rotate any way it wants. Your fixed connection provides a reaction that only goes up. You know, this is up and sideways, right? And then your fixed doesn't let it move in any direction and it also resists rotation, right? That's the one I would use if I had to pick between these three. I would simply choose the one that does not make the bridge move.

Oh, bad choice. Fuck, as we'll get into. All right. So, all right. So when you have like a beam, right? In this case, okay, so let's look at this beam, right? We have P here. P is the load, right?

The load going on the beam, right? P is stored in the beam. Yeah. P is stored in the beam, yes. And from that, we can figure out, okay, there's some reactions because the sum of the reaction, the sum of the forces is equal to zero, or else something's moving. And if something's moving on a bridge, you have a problem. And from that, you can start to calculate more information, right? So number one, this is M here.

M is the moment, right? A moment is sort of like torque. It's a twisting force, right? Hmm. So get bridges twisting. You don't want your bridge twisting. That's why you use the fixed connection point at every opportunity. No, don't do that, actually.

I'm doubling down on this. I'm refusing to learn anything. Just make the fixed connection stronger. So if you have a P in the middle here, and we know that this is a pin, it allows rotation. This is a roller, it also allows rotation. Then we know the moment is zero at each end, right? So the highest point of moment is in the middle of the beam here, right? Right.

So that's sort of like the, again, it's measured in like foot pounds or pound inches, something like that. Very similar to torque, except that nothing's moving. Below that, we have Q. We're not going to talk about that. That's just shear force, which... Well, we go one, we go all. Yes, exactly. And then underneath that, we have W.

W is your deflection, right? Which is the integral of the moment, right? And that's based on... Barely know what any of these things are. That's, it's a visual representation of what the beam looks like and how far it will deflect, right? Given any amount of load, right? So that's based on your Young's modulus, which we talked about in episode one, briefly, if I recall correctly. Which is sort of just a measure of strength of materials, generally.

And something called the moment of inertia. Which is this wonderful measurement, which is measured in like inches to the fourth. Ow! And it's a very, very difficult to calculate, which is why the way, the way you do it in real life is not you calculated. It's you look it up in a chart. You simply use a computer to do all of this nerd stuff.

And you just go ahead and build the bridge like the Chad that you are. Of course. Yes. That's what we do today. So you can see here this, the moment here goes down to a point. We have, I don't know. Let's say this, this beam is 10 feet long and there's a thousand pounds on the beam, right? I gotta do math here.

Oh, it's even, it's even getting to you. You're the one who knows this stuff. I know, right? I gotta do this, I gotta do this in my head. I should have written this down. The reactions would be 500, 500 pounds upward at both ends. And then the moment at the middle would be 500 pounds times five feet. So that would be 2,500 foot pounds right here going and that increases linearly all the way up.

Here's the fun thing. The convention when you're drawing these diagrams is that a positive moment is below the neutral like zero line here. What? Yeah. I hate that. I know, right? So a positive moment causes something to sag like this.

A negative moment makes it bow up. That's called hogging. Okay. Love for my beam to be hogging because there's not enough pee. Yes. So all right. But you can see like you have the slope going. Well, I guess that goes down and this is the integral.

So you see the slope goes from negative to positive. You know, it's like it's a little bit annoying how these diagrams are drawn. And then we're perfectly clear to me. Easy stuff. Easy. This is great. Do you have anything more advanced for? Exactly.

All right. Oh, a little, little bit of easy, easy for easy stuff. And not, you know, I feel like everybody at Drexel failed statics like seven times and you still don't know what you're doing. I was really good at statics. Statics was the only thing I was good at. I'm sorry for insulting you this way. So, because a lot of it, if you could figure out what it was supposed to look like visually,

you could work backwards and do the calculus. Instead of trying to like derive this from first principles and like it invents a bridge with numbers. Yeah. Yeah. You do back. You got, I was like, yeah, that looks about right. That doesn't look about right.

What was logged with logs across rivers or ropes or ropes across rivers? What were we not crossing rivers? Yeah, just do it. You don't need to do that. Yeah. So, all right. And then over here, we have a fixed connection, which means that the beam stays at that same angle the whole way, which means our, our, if we have a load, this is a distributed load

here, which is a little different, you know, the moment is highest at the connection as opposed to here, where it's in the middle, you know, on our deflection looks a little different. That's nice and secure. I mean, that's sagging a whole lot down at the end. It's fine. You just put another fixed connection on the other end. Excuse me. The curve is actually up here.

So while this, while this beam is pointed down, it's actually technically hogging, not sagging. Well, yes. Am I supposed to find this erotic? Yes. Okay. All right. So now this is like a simple beam. But what we do is simple beam.

Can you, I would love to hear your idea of a simpler example for a beam, then one load and two reactions. Yeah, it's hard, man. This is hard. And I say, yeah, that's a beam. That looks like a beam to me. That looks good. I think we're done here, boys.

Yeah. So down here, we have a truss, right? And your theoretical truss lets you do away with a whole lot of the complexities here, right? Because when we draw a truss, when we theorize a truss, every connection is a hinge, right? All of this can rotate freely, exactly like polybranches actually. That's how the theory works, right? And then this will be like a pin connection here and over here, we have a roller.

I've added two little circles underneath to indicate roller because those are like wheels that it rides on, right? So this means we don't have to worry about moments at all in a truss. Every force is applied longitudinally, which means we don't have to worry about moment of inertia so much. You can actually worry exclusively about just how much like the amount of steel you're using in each member rather than the specific cross section, right? Hmm.

Engineers lazy and don't like doing math much like we don't like doing math. So yeah, you just minimize that. All the forces are applied at joints rather than, you know, in the middle of a section of material, right? So now I mentioned that one end is a hinge, one end is a roller. Now this simplifies our calculations a lot. That's one of the reasons why you do it, right? Oh yeah, it feels simple.

Yeah, so it makes the truss statically determinant, right? Which means it's easy to calculate everything out on paper. You know what all the forces are. Yeah, it just makes calculating forces a matter of trigonometry. But also, it's good for expansion and contraction of the bridge, right? You know, for, you know, thermal expansion and contraction. So this is a picture of an actual roller. Wait a second.

You're telling me that every bridge is just like on fucking wheels? And I didn't know this the whole time. Oh yeah. Alice, you freaked out when I talked about rocket towers. I mean. Yes, yes, bridges, bridges, bridges on my fish. I am terrified now. I don't think that's unfair.

Why can't you just put like a solid thing into the ground and like put a thing in between the two solid things? What's so difficult about that? Then when it expands, it would force itself against a solid thing and over a period of years, maybe decades, it would start to crack and eventually fail. No, make the solid things stronger. Yeah, but make the solid things stronger. You build a bunch of houses and shops on the middle of the span to encourage commerce,

you know, around. So all right. So you can see this is this is a roller, right? There's two like gears, sort of geared wheels here. You can see also right in the middle, there's a pin sticking through a slot here. That's so it doesn't expand or contract too much. So you don't want the thing to roll right off, you know? Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a pin. We make fun of helicopters and yet here we are. So, okay. Now, this particular bridge was made out of two kinds of structural members, right? Now, if we remember back to episode one, a lot of early trusses were made of I-bars, right, which are sort of explicitly built to conform to truss theory, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then after that, we start to get into sort of different shapes as manufacturing and engineering improves, right? So on the I-35 Westbridge, the main structural members were something that depending on who you are, you might call an I-beam, you might call an H-beam, you might call a W-section, which stands for... How is that a W? It's a wide flange.

Okay. Yeah. This is the flange. This is the flange. This is the web. This is my body. This is my blood. No, this is an I and it's an I-bar and I mean an I-beam as distinct from an I-bar,

which is like a bar with an I and E-Y-E-I in it. Yes. This is... None of this is confusing. No, it's... If you're struggling to keep up with this, it is your fault and you should have studied harder. Oh, I apologize to the people who listen to this audio only. All right.

Sorry folks. Now, so some of the members were W-sections like this guy. Other ones were what we call box members, right? Which is this guy here, right? So a box member is a long hollow beam, right? It sort of is in the cross-section is a box, right? And there are some small ones you can get. Those are rolled in a rolling mill, right?

You know, you just take a sheet of steel and you put it through several rollers until it's in a box shape. And then you sort of weld the top, you know. But if you're making really big ones, usually instead of doing that, what they'll do is they'll take a couple L-sections or maybe a C-channel. Those ones actually look like what they sound like they are. And they'll weld them together. And, you know, that'll be the finished structural section, right? So these developed from an earlier form of structural member called the lattice girder, right?

Which is this guy right here. Oh, cool, like trellis supports. Oh, yeah, because once welding technology got better, they realized they could just manufacture this all in one piece as opposed to this relatively labor-intensive lattice, right? It looks nicer, though. It does look nicer. Now, this is the both of these that we're looking at here on the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. And when the when the when the truss force and collapsed in that earthquake, earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.

They usually are pretty quick. Yeah, that's true. Well, you know, it's like it's like how quick used to mean alive. Yeah, the quick and the dead. Yeah, exactly. So when when that when that when the portion of the Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed in the big earthquake, right, they actually went through and retrofitted the old span. They removed all the lattice girders and just replaced them one for one with the back sections.

Reject me. I understand. Embrace tradition. Yeah, I want to go back. I do like lattice girders a lot. And also, there's, you know, they they're good. They're kind of ornamental even like Penn Station and a lot of those like the old one. Yeah.

But yeah, these even though they use more material, they're cheap to produce. OK, so those are the main structural members. Now, what holds them together? Bunch of rivets. Yes, it is not blue. OK, this is where this is where we're going to this is where I'm going to continue to argue against Alice's make everything a fixed connection. No, make everything a fixed connection.

It's strong. I live out here. Yeah. All right. So what we're looking at here is called a gusset plate, right? OK. So at the end of all of these beams, you have to attach them together somehow. And the way you do it is with this gusset plate where you have a big thick steel plate

and you put today you would use bolts back. But back in the day, you use rivets. You put through the aesthetic looks nicer. Yeah, I'll agree with both of those. And, you know, the forces from the beam are transferred through the plate to the other beams, right? And you can sort of see how building to the theory is happening here, right? Yeah. Because we have rivets back, though, like genuinely, bring bring back the thing

where you just have a guy with a thing of multi. Yes, we're there. Yeah, just like a fucking like a guy with a gun. Yeah, awesome. I'm about to get to that. Oh, boy. So you can sort of see how building to the theory is at work here because you have this large box section up here, right? And you notice it's not actually supporting the deck above it, right?

That's being supported by another beam up here, right? Which isn't connected to the like long transverse beam, right? No, the transverse beam. So hold on. Let me make sure I remember all of the goddamn names. You got your transverse beam. You got your cisverse beam. You got your gender fluid beam.

Yes. You're going to watch for those gender fluid beams. You don't know what the loads are on those. Prodowns are bad. We have to use proper names for everyone all the time. You just have to introduce yourself and you're like, my name is Justin Rosniak and my pronouns are Justin Rosniak. Yes. So, all right.

So you got the deck up here, right? This beam supporting it here is called a stringer, right? Okay. There are several stringers supporting the beam. They are on top of what's called the floor beam. That's the transverse one, right? Okay. The floor beam is at every joint so that the load is only applied at the joints, right?

Since this is a wide bridge, there's also a floor truss, which you can see up here. You know, adding to the general sort of, it's just complexity, I guess. Just, I have gem bones playing in my head. The floor truss is connected to the floor beam and the floor beam is connected to the stringer beam. Yes. Yeah. But yeah, so all the loads are actually applied at all the joints, right? So, now these are older gusset plates here and they are riveted, right?

And rivets produce a more rigid connection than what we do now, which is we do bolts, right? Yeah. And this is good and bad. Because, you know... Good because it, well, it's bad because it looks less cool. Yes. But it's good because it gives all these beams a little bit of wiggle room. You know, they can rotate ever so slightly, right?

But when you have a rivet that completely fills the hole, rather than having only, you know, transverse or longitudinal, what's it called? Forces. You might get a little bit of a twisting force in there. Now, that's not important to what we're talking about today, I guess, but... So, now there's some calculations associated with gusset plates. I'm not going to talk about them because they're too damn complicated. Off to the shit. This is when you throw it in the towel.

Oh, yeah, he's off the throttle after we've melted your blades into pop. So, I don't want to do... It's basically like doing finite element analysis, which we usually do on a computer, but on paper. Which people have figured out how to do in the 20s. People smarter than I am. Just with a slide rule, also. Yeah, but there's some established methods of calculating how to size these things. They were established in the 1961 AASHTO manual on Highway Bridge construction.

But even in 1961, the actual science on this was still a little bit primitive. And your gusset plate is usually the weak point in any truss structure, right? Because, you know, you've got all these rivets. You know, you got stuff can start to crack here really easily. So, now the loads on this bridge, right? You have so every structure has dead loads and live loads, right? Yeah, dead load is just the stuff that's in the structure, right? It's there all the time.

Yeah, so your dead load is the bridge itself. Um, which the bridge, you know, the structure, the deck, the various accoutrements. So, you know, lights, you know, the guardrails, you know, all the stuff that's there all the time, and then your live load is trucks and snow. Right, those are the two things you consider cars. Just don't figure like next to trucks. Yeah, exactly. No, it's just trucks.

Because trucks, because general sort of general rule is it's, you know, the weight of the vehicle to the fourth power. So, you know, the amount of damage that trucks are doing is so completely out of proportion to any other vehicle that crosses the bridge. You only consider trucks and snow. Man, it seems like trucks are a kind of a shitty way to transport stuff. Maybe we shouldn't have like invested in transporting everything in the world with them.

Yeah, exactly. Build a train, build a train. Yeah. So bridge back. Yep. Simply do not cross water. Man should have never crossed the phrase. Like one of those utopia images is just like if society had never discovered

the bridge and it's just like a perfect like a futuristic society that exists in one tiny wedge between the two. That's it's very confusing because the usual image you use for that that meme actually includes a bridge. Ah, fuck. No, we have a bridgeless one. All right. So now you're live load because, you know, stuff's moving.

Every bridge has cyclical loading, right? So, you know, one track crosses the bridge. That's one load cycle, right? Obviously, there's many simultaneous load cycles and all these bridges though, you know, they don't deflect very much from one truck. They're seeing millions and millions of load cycles every year, right? And very subtly bends the bridge out of shape, right? You know, it's the same as like if you take a paper clip and you,

you know, bend it back and forth a whole bunch of times, right? Should have made all of the connections much more fixed and much stronger. No, that would do the opposite of what you think it would do. Don't care. Don't care. It's intuitive to me. Give me the bristle bridge. Yeah, I was, it was fine.

It was completely, it was completely rigid intact until one day when it just split in half and then exploded. The entire bridge settles into the bottom of the river perfectly. Every single. And then you stack it on top. Yeah, there you go. I was so it was so rigid that here is a dam. It was so rigid that when it finally broke, it's sort of like exploded

and clipped through reality like a. It makes the like a crashing sound. So yeah, there's there's load cycles got on this bridge constantly. This is why you have to do maintenance. You know, and there's also other things. It's Minnesota, right? So you have a lot of salt and freeze thought that's affecting the structure, which we'll get into in a bit.

Anyway, so this bridge was designed by Sphere Group and Parcel. Not a real name. Yeah, built from 1964 to 1967. It opened a traffic that year. It performed adequately for 40 years, right? You can see just a workhorse, you know, not important enough that anybody gives it a name or anything. Yeah, it performs adequately.

Yeah, exactly. You can see here. They're finishing up the last center section. You can see here to iron workers just hanging on the side with no sort of safety equipment at all 60s. Yeah, I know. Both day drinking. Yeah, back in the day.

Yeah, lighter cigarette off the welder. Yeah. All right. It calms the nerves. It calms the nerves. So, you know, stuff gets old and it breaks. Minnesota Department of Transportation was performing regular inspections, but they weren't making too many repairs, right?

So from 1991 on, it was rated as structurally deficient, right? Now, a lot of bridges in the United States get a structurally deficient rating on inspection, right? And that doesn't mean they're about to collapse. Pennsylvania is the worst, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah, listen, man, we will replace the covered bridges when they come and take them from us.

Those aren't the structurally deficient ones. Yeah, all we need to do is systematically defund every Department of Transportation and Public Works for like 30 to 40 years and then see what happens. We won't have any bridges anymore. And we can finally achieve utopia. Exactly. So, you know, if a bridge is structurally deficient, that

sounds really bad. It's only moderately bad, usually. Doesn't mean they're about to collapse, usually, but they might require major maintenance, you know, they might put a weight limit on the bridge, something like that. And our whole trust structure on this bridge was something called fracture critical, right? That means failure of one member on this bridge would cause

the entire trust section to come down. Donning my Ed Harris waistcoat and being like failure is not an option. Yeah, I think this was to make it easier to build. I'll explain that in a couple of slides. Hmm. Here's here's a guy like a severe drip and parcel or whatever. We're just like, yeah, no, it's fine.

They'll just maintain it like we did. We did tell them that if any of this shit breaks, then the thing will collapse. So yeah. So and this is this is fun. Here's some guys doing in this highly compressed image is a guy in a so this is like this. This is like a cherry picker, but instead it goes under the

bridge and so that's that's that kind of truck is called a snooper, right? This actually feels less safe to me than the guys just hanging onto the side. I would feel more uncomfortable just on just out on the end of that. Oh, yeah. They have some serious outriggers on this thing.

I think it's fine unless it isn't. Well, like by the same token, you could say that about the sixties guys. It's fine unless you let go of the beam. So yeah, which case it won't be my problem anymore. Three points of contact, three points of contact at all times. Okay, one guy who was on the they did an interview with a

bond of fuselage or whatever demolition tech in in Afghanistan and they said, like, how do you keep calm? You know, with such pressure and he basically said, well, either I do my job, right? Or it's not my problem anymore. The part of me that would worry about that is like being embedded in my friend's neck or something. At like, so okay, there were a couple of renovations that

happened to this bridge over the years. Right. An extremely good. E E E E. Yes, it bothers me that he doesn't finish. E a sports in the game. Feel better. Feel better for that.

Thanks. Appreciate it. About E E E E. Cut her mic. Cut her mic. That's it. So in 1977, there's the first renovation, right? So a whole bunch of bridges in Minnesota were succumbing to

road salt because the decks were too thin and all the salt migrated through the concrete. We're too thin, though. What were too thin? Oh, I, I miss her too. I miss her too. So in 1977, they decided we need to make this deck thicker. Right.

Oh yeah, buddy. Yes. Buying some performance pills off of Russian language website. No one's ever heard of. We need to start jelking this bridge. That's actually why Arpanet was invented is to buy dickpills for the Russians. I'm starting to hormone therapy or hormone therapy, but for

the gender I already am. Doing muscle confusion. Just switching back really fast. I have achieved gender Nirvana. I am all gender simultaneous. Trailer. So, okay. So in 1977, there is the first renovation, right?

The contractors milled the bridge deck down to a quarter an inch above the rebar. And then on top of that, they added two inches of low slump concrete, right? So low slump concrete. You can see here a man performing the slump test, right? High impact violence and sex. So the slump test is going to do to the shoe.

What do you have here? You have a coffee mod from Grand Theft Auto. Yeah, that literally actually. Yeah. So what you have here is a cone, right? It's a metal cone. It's standardized. And you fill this cone with concrete, right?

And you level it off at the top and you tamp it down, right? And then what you do is you lift up the cone. And you measure how far the concrete slumps. Okay. That's the slump test. Right. Love to slump. And what you do this for is to ensure every batch of concrete

you're getting is the same as other batches you got, right? You know, because they got to ship it over usually in a concrete truck, which is, you know, not necessarily, you can have bad consistency between different concrete trucks, right? And if you have to make the concrete in different batches, you want to make sure those batches are consistent. And the slump test on its own doesn't tell you much about the concrete, but it can definitely tell you that a concrete batch

is similar to another concrete batch, right? Okay. So if you have a low slump concrete, that means it doesn't slump too far when you take the cone off, which means in this case, it's a concrete with the low water cement ratio, which means it's really difficult to work with and it sets really quickly, right? It's good for a road surface, right?

Because you can open a road more quickly. You know, and all you have to do is like just shove it into place and it's basically fine, right? So, but one of the things about that is you got to mix the concrete on site because it sets so quickly. You can't bring it in in a big concrete truck. Yeah, you just have a bunch of big concrete mixers positioned on this bridge that you've shaved down.

Yeah. Just again, nothing, nothing in construction or inspection of bridges makes me feel at ease at all, you know? Yeah. So when they did this, they added two extra inches of concrete to the deck in total, right? And that increased the dead load on the bridge by 3 million pounds, which about 13%, right?

That's fine. Makes them more solid. Exactly. So then in 1986 and 1997, they did some inspections on the deck girder per deck girder portion, right? Um, and they decided they were going to drill some stress relief holes to stop some of the cracks. Is that the sex scene?

Okay. That's what the kids call it. So when you have like a crack, right? Like this in a piece of steel, right? It generally starts getting bigger because there's a big stress concentration right around the end, right? One of the things you can do to stop a crack from getting bigger is to drill a big hole at the end.

No, don't do that. You'll make it weaker. Why would you drill holes in this beautiful bridge where everything is fixed together? I am going to be the best bridge engineer in the world. This is counterintuitive, but it reduce, well, so you have less, you have less material. But you reduce the concentration of stress at any

particular point. So it's a lot less likely to have a problem, right? Or to continue expanding. Now, obviously if the crack is bad enough, you know, it's going to keep going. But yeah, we have, we have drilled a hole the size of the bridge. We had to drill the bridge in order to save it, but the

crack won't expand anymore. Yes. So in 1997, there were some improvements to the roadway, right? They put new barriers on, they put new lighting on, they put in an anti-icing system because it's Minnesota and this bridge would just get covered in black ice like constantly.

And this added another 1.13 million pounds of dead load onto the bridge. It's another 6.1%, right? It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. And over time, you know, cars, trucks, buses become larger and heavier, mostly trucks, of course.

Traffic gets worse, right? So there's more loading cycles happening and every loading cycle is heavier than it was before, right? And of course, corrosion is happening because, you know, in the wintertime, it's just pure salt everywhere. You know, because it's a very hostile environment to the bridge, isn't it? Very hostile environment to anything metal.

And then, you know, stuff's corroding. In 2007, they do a project to repair a sinkhole under a pier and then they start repaving the bridge, right? Okay. Because the, you know, there's a nice thing about a concrete deck is it lasts very long. This is about 30, well, this is exactly 30 years, which is about how long you expect a concrete roadway to last

as opposed to an asphalt roadway, which 10 years at best. Just, just do wood, just do wood. Well, there's a wooden, there's a wooden deck bridge over the Delaware, I think, somewhere way up the way up the river. It's one of those tiny ones. No, I'm talking about this. I want like a giant, like a freeway bridge is made entirely

out of wood. One of those is actually, I can't think of where it is offhand. There's a couple of cross laminated timber bridges which have gone up in the past two or three decades. Really? Yeah. I don't like that.

They look real good. Looks so Scandinavian and shit. Yeah. Yeah, I got this in a flat pack from Ikea. So, all right. So they hire a company called Progressive Contractors Incorporated. Gemsawks.

That sounds awesome. Well, yeah, you get them to repair the Warren Truss, obviously. They're from St. Michael, Minnesota. Their job was to remove the two inch layer of concrete that was put in in 1977. That's the wearing layer, right? Because it wears down and they'd repave the bridge

with new concrete. They'd patched some miscellaneous details in the curbs, install new expansion joints and remove and replace the anti-icing system, right? The project began in June of 2007 and substantial completion was set for September 21st, 2007. Which is one of the problems when you do concrete repaving is you can you can repave an asphalt road in

like two days. Concrete repaving is a much more substantial job. Yeah, and you have to do it in summer so as not to just have a bunch of fucking snow landing on your ship. Yeah, exactly. It's going to throw off the water cement ratio. So, all right. So they're still using low slump concrete, right?

Now, concrete is a mixture. Concrete is different from cement. Don't say cement when you mean concrete. All right. So go off, King. Yeah. Yeah, get the rest. So concrete is made of gravel and sand.

That's your aggregate, right? You got cement. You got water. Sometimes you have admixtures, which is, you know, stuff like you add something, add a weird chemical to it to give it some special properties, right? I love I love adding weird chemicals to stuff to give it some special properties.

Oh, yeah, you do some alchemy, but with concrete. I turned I turned gold into 10,000 PSI concrete. I wonder if you could like just randomly just throw precious element into concrete and just be like, yeah, it's got some gold in there and just sell it for more. Yeah, some alchemist is like trying to make the perfect concrete and he was like, I threw a bunch of emeralds in here and then like they do the slump test on it and

just because this is low slump concrete, that meant, of course, it had to be mixed on site, right? I'm a big concrete mixes on the bridge. Yeah. So since the bridge was supposed to be kept open to traffic while they were repaving, right? They weren't going to close it for a couple months. Um, you couldn't like stage all the materials on the ground.

Um, so they decided, well, we're going to try and keep it on the on ramps and other parts as much as possible. We're going to have to do a couple stages where we take all the aggregates and stage them on top of the bridge, right? We're getting closer to the tasteless drop. So, okay. In early afternoon, August 1st, 2007, there was a big

concrete pour scheduled that day for 530 feet of bridge between node 14. That's right here. Yeah. And node zero prime over here. You notice that this goes zero to 14 to 13 with an apostrophe down to zero with an apostrophe. That's because engineers hate naving conventions that make

sense and are easier. It also reflects that the bridge is identical on both sides. You know, it's symmetric, but you know, the, the, the whole thing where you have to like, you know, you have it. Why would you do primes instead of like negative numbers? Yeah, that would make a lot of sense. Well, why wouldn't you have a node like I realize negative zero is like insanely annoying to mathematicians, but it

makes a hell of a lot more sense than zero prime. Yeah, it doesn't make it the way this is. I feel like I would get confused if I were looking at engineering documents with this naming convention, even if it's like, yeah, you're supposed to, you know, just swap these around. I don't know how the construction documents were set up. So now they were, they were going to pave this whole

section. They had paved a few other sections of the bridges bridge successfully, but they hadn't staged all the construction material on the bridge before, right? They had my fingers hovering over the button. So the button that makes people unsubscribe. All the stuff was staged from pier six to about node ten right up here.

You can see that up here, right? This was taken about two hours before the collapse by someone taking tourist pictures from an airplane. Oh, Lord. So in the early afternoon, they put all this stuff out on the bridge for a concrete poor scheduled for 7 p.m. that evening, August, the rush hour. Well, I wanted to avoid the midday heat because that might

affect how the concrete cures as opposed to a bunch of Minnesotans driving home from work, which absolutely will not. Yeah, exactly. Well, around 605 p.m. the bridge and 190 people on it just fell right in the river. A man has fallen into the river in Lego City. Start the new rescue helicopter.

Yeah, yeah. Good Lord Jesus. I felt bad about that as I was doing it. But I was like, yeah, no. So not great. Lego cop beats him with a tiny Lego baton. This isn't that cute. So all right.

So as a result of the, you know, the bridge collapses to 13 people die, 34 serious injuries, 111 minor injuries. I think a school bus fell in there as well. Jesus. Yeah. Oh, just make me feel worse about it. Why don't you? You sure it's.

The rest of the video is me doing penance for thinking that would be a funny thing to do. So, okay. What happened? Put too much shit on the bridge. Bridge fall. Put too much shit on the bridge. Bridge fall down, go boom.

Hey, what happened? Should have done fixed connections and made it stronger. Should have done it with Alice. Well, so that's right. Alice, they technically were using fixed connections because it was a riveted, they were riveted gusset plates. Should have made them stronger. She was hanging in rivets.

So investigators trace the failure to one particular gusset plate. A one member, which was gusset plate. You 10. That's right here, right? Write it. Write it. No 10. And you see the upper.

When you say investigators, I like for everything else, I picture like crash investigators for this and just like makes me think of like some fucking law and order shit, just two guys and like coats and like detective badges going around interviewing structural members. Are they got like they got like a cracked gusset plate in the interrogation room that's trying to do. So.

So you 10 was on the upper core to the bridge right around here. And they found out it was under designed. How did that happen? No, yeah, that's all right. So here's the here's the center section of bridge after it fell in a river. Now looking to hot. Yeah, one joke about it just falling in the river. Huh?

Yep. And you can sort of see here how this is the north section of the bridge on the land. You can see how that whole section of the bridge sort of rotated down and just crashed, right? Oh, yeah. And I think this is that this this is how it failed, you know, once some since it was fracture critical, right?

Because you can sort of see that if this joint goes here, right? Then this whole section of the bridge is a goner, obviously, but then there's nothing to counterbalance this part of the bridge here because of course, this is a pin connection, pin connection. So that just sort of rotates down and all right. So this is just an impulse production. I didn't explain this adequately. I think in the in the actual recording.

So what I'm talking about here is that if you look at this bridge, right, you have three distinct sections, right? Between pier five and pier six between pier six and pier seven between pier seven and pier eight, right? These are all interdependent on each other. And I think in a newer bridge, you would not do that. I let me explain. Okay, so.

At pier six and pier seven, that's where you want to pay attention here. Um, in a new bridge, a new trust bridge, which generally you don't do. That's for reasons of cost rather than having one member. That bears down on the pier. You would have two, right? So you would have two on top of pier six, you would have two on top of pier seven, thus making each individual span its own thing, right? So when this bridge was built, um, there were this, this was not considered

best practice, um, because it's much cheaper to not do that. And I'll explain why. So when you're building the bridge, right? What you would do in this case, just realize my air conditioners running. I'm sorry if you can hear that in the background. What you would do is if you were starting from pier six, which is where you would start, you would build, uh, the members at eight here, then you would go out both sides, right?

So you'd get seven and nine, right? Just like Star Trek, you would keep going out, you would get six, you would get 10, you do five, you do 11, you do four, you do 12. Now I'm circling right on the upper, but that would be the whole section of bridge, right on both sides, right? And because you were doing those simultaneously, they would counter balance each other, right? And you would have some temporary supports underneath as you keep going

out until you get into the extremities, which is why that picture I showed earlier of them completing the bridge, they didn't need, you know, any kind of, uh, temporary supports over the river. And I suppose on this sort of bridge since, you know, your entire outside cantilever is overland, they may not have needed any cantilever and any temporary supports inside the river, which, you know, would have made it a little easier to construct. So that's why I was saying that, you know, if they made this a sort of fracture

critical bridge, it was a lot easier to put together than if they decided to make each and every individual span, um, you know, not interdependent on any other span, right? Right. Let me know in the comments if you're confused by this. Okay. Back to the podcast. How do I turn this off?

Crash is down, right? Should've used effects one. Should've used effects one. I think it wouldn't have helped. I don't know if it's supposed to. How would we know? You know, has the fixed bridge killed anybody else? Has it?

How's it? How's it? How are we looking at fixed bridge? No, we're not. Yeah, what do you know? You can take that degree and shove it up your ass. All right. So, okay.

Um, so, uh, what happened here? Right. So, Sphere Drip and Partial started designing this bridge in 1962. Keep in mind, that's only one year after the, after the guidelines for Gusset plates came out for AASHTO. Now, this bridge was originally designed to make use of HSLA steel, right? High strength, low alloy.

Al anemesis. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Minnesota Department of Transportation made them ditch the high strength steel fairly early on in the process. The whole thing was made a mild steel. Just to make it easier to fabricate, right? Um, and to the best of the knowledge of folks at the NTSB,

the bridge was designed adequately, mostly. Hmm. Love them mostly adequate. That's like, it gets like a barely passing grade. Yeah. So, when you design something like a bridge, you know, a major structure, so on and so forth, right, you do calculations, right? You're the engineer and you check the calculations and you double

check the calculations. And most of the time, if you're trying to get permits and if you're trying to fulfill a contract, you not only are submitting drawings to, you know, your permitting office or your contractors, you're also submitting the calculations, right? And those calculations come with a professional engineer stamp. And that means if they're wrong, you're criminally liable for them, right? The higher-regency collapse episode we did being another good example.

Yeah, exactly. This is like the world's worst math test. It's like, well, if you score less than a hundred, you go to jail. So yeah. E-stamps rule, by the way, because I was looking up a while back, specimen ones, just to see what they looked like. And each state uses a different name. Like Illinois just has like 0-0-0-1 Abraham Lincoln.

Wow. My favorite is Utah's, which was like, I forget what number it was, but the name was John Engineer. And I was just like, yeah, that's the guy from Halo. John117, engineer. That was the guy who invented engineering, actually. It was John Engineer. We all look up to him.

So yeah, you get the math wrong, you might go to jail. You might also kill a whole bunch of people. So the NTSB went through the archives and looked up the, tried to find the calculations for these gusset plates, right? And they found them, but only for the lower court of the trust, right? That's the stuff on the bottom. These upper gusset plates, no one could find the calculations for them. Oh, what the fuck?

Did they not do them? That is, that, that, that is one of the main theories about why these were under-designed. You just do half of the thing and you're just like, well, it's symmetrical, right? Yeah, that's probably fine. It's, it's like one of the diagrams that we use for this is just like heavily photocopied.

So, you know, they did a computer analysis of the bridge after the fact and that showed that, you know, through, through this bridge's modifications, of course, it, you know, the gusset plates were beginning to become over stressed, but not to the point where they would fail on the lower court. Much like me, it like, it gains a bunch of weight and that puts all of the like retaining features under more stress. But the upper gusset plates, right? Lower gusset plates were mostly fine.

Upper gusset plates were riding the ragged edge of failure at least since the 1997 renovation. Well, good. And that's before they decided to put in another like few million pounds of weight, right? That was when they added the extra million pounds of weight. That was when the final extra million pounds of weight was added. So a physical inspection in 2003 showed that some of the most over stressed

plates, those are at the U10 and U10 prime locations, both on the east and west trusts, you can see they're just bowing out just a little bit, just a little bit, you know, you, you, it's subtle, but it's noticeable, right? And this is a problem. This is something you need to address when you see it. Just hammer that dent back in. It's fine. It's fine.

Yeah, deferred maintenance is good, actually. I'll go get the Billy Mays pops a dent and I'll fix this right up. So when they did, when they, when they decided to repave the deck, right, all that construction material staged on top, these gusset plates finally failed. Right. And since it's failure, critical construction, the whole bridge went in the drink. Just just pop right open.

Just the like metal snap or what? Oh, yeah. I mean, I imagine that this time there were probably some cracks starting to develop in them. Well, there are some pictures in the report. I did not or some theory theoretical or well, they're diagrams of how the gusset plates were found. But since there was not really a underside of the bridge inspection since

2003 one, we don't know exactly what they look like. Right. Yeah. I just iced tea in like an overcoat digging a gusset plate out of the bottom of the river. Yeah. For a sick son of a bitch. So yeah, they put a 260 times through their ears now.

Yeah, this is now a law and order appreciation episode. I'm sorry to just totally take it off. Those shows rule. So 260 tons of construction material on top of a gusset plate that was inadequately designed for the start, not a good not a good and extra weight from other bridge bullshit. Is not a good combination term for it. Yes.

So yeah, down she went do your calculations, folks calculations. Don't put a bunch of extra shit on top of your bridge. Yeah, exactly. You all were trying to give me shit earlier in this early on this PowerPoint for say we're doing calculations. Now you realize what happens. Well, the day I become a bridge designer, I will you will be the first to know they had a podcast to do this right on my interview.

And now I need Ross to bail me out. Make it thicker. Easy. Done. Mormon doesn't matter how much the bridge weighs. You know, just just make it make it heavier. It'll be fine. That's right.

So all right. So the NTSB eventually concluded they had never done a calculation for the upper quarter of the bridge. They put the bridge up anyway. Another problem was that there were load rating guidelines for what you could add to bridges, right? But they only took and took a account of parts of the bridge that weren't the gusset plates.

Oh, good. They did not take into account the gusset plates as part of the most vulnerable part of the whole. Yes. Carassus and they're just like, yeah, it's fine. Yeah, it's fine. All the other structural members in the bridge perfectly fine for the extra weight they added.

And when they realized their error and in 2007, they started inspecting gusset plates when they had weight to the bridge. Oh, good. I feel so reassured. You died and you learned. And a lot of inspections were stepped up to determine if similar under-designed plates existed, right? Okay.

And then, of course, the lawsuits. Of course. Yeah. May 2nd, 2008, the state of Minnesota reached a $38 million agreement to compensate victims of the bridge collapse. Okay. That's like a number of Xboxes. It's a couple hundred thousand dollars.

That's not that bad. Get a couple hundred Xboxes. Exactly. So in August 2010, the last of the lawsuits against URS Corporation who did the 2003 inspection that showed the buckling in the gusset plates. That was settled for $52.4 million. You know, and there was like all kinds of bullshit going on there. The state of Minnesota tried to bring a lawsuit against the original

engineering company, but it had been, you know, absorbed by another engineering company. Yeah, that's the kind of fuckup that you've got to do as a structural engineer is fuck it up badly, but not badly enough that it fails immediately, but enough that you can have your whole career like persist. And then like your firm like no longer exists because it gets absorbed into another thing and another thing. And then like in 50 years time, it kills a bunch of people on a school bus.

Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, make sure you're dead before it collapses. So, you know, the engineering firm that it was eventually absorbed into, which is Jacob's engineering group, you know, they were like, well, you know, too much time has passed. You can't sue us. And then in 2012, the Supreme Court turned down its appeal and make

an actually good decision. They settled out of court for eight point nine million dollars without admitting any wrongdoing. Awesome. This is this is what we want. Yeah. Well, you can hardly revoke the guy's PE license, which is what you should do because the guy was probably dead.

Exume the guy and like take it off him. I'm assuming that's when he's a parent. Yeah, I dig his ass back up. Take that shit off him. Um, yeah. No, I mean, also like the, um, to what extent, my question is to what extent is this reflective of just like letting a bunch of critical infrastructure inspection and maintenance and stuff slide because no one

had the money to do it. I mean, the bizarre thing is they were doing the inspections and they saw there were clearly problems that needed to be addressed and they just didn't fix them. Ah, okay. Hmm. Awesome. Which has been my experience from working in, uh, well, the private

sector, um, you know, real work, not government work, which is that people will pay to get the inspections done that they need to get done and they'll get the report back that says all of these critical issues need to be addressed immediately and then they'll just, you know, file it away. Yeah, exactly. I feel like, you know, sometimes people should be compelled to act. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, this, I love to like have this thing where you're like illegally required to do the inspection. So you do the inspections and then just not anything else. It's fine. Just like you're aware. It doesn't matter. There's no consequences anymore. Who cares?

That's not true. You may be liable to eventually pay like $9 million and not admit that you did anything wrong. Yes. I can hate those settlements in 40 years. You should bring the stocks back. You just got to sit there and eat some shit for a couple of weeks. It'll be fine.

You'll be all right. You'll still be alive at the end of it. So another thing that happened like very quickly, people were talking about, all right, we got to replace the bridge. So this is the St. Anthony Falls Bridge. I don't like it. Looks like a condo.

It kind of does. Yeah. What is South Florida? We're a bridge. Yeah. This is a design and built in under a year. Now when they were scoping out this bridge, there were a couple public meetings on it and citizens of Minneapolis made it explicitly

clear that they wanted an extension of the city's light rail system on the bridge, right? Whoa. The mayor also. I assume they got it, right? Of course. Like once you have the citizens and the politicians like united behind something.

They definitely got it. Is that right? That's what happened, right? No, the Minnesota DOT was like, no, we need 10 lanes of highway traffic. No, you got it. Just God damn it, dude. Like, I know how this ends, but just God damn it. Oh, they compromised.

They compromised and went with 10 lanes of highway traffic and called the bridge light rail ready. Oh, okay. Well, that's good. No, that I assume is meaningful, right? Yeah, that definitely means something at any time. You can take out a couple of lanes of highway traffic and add in some light rail, a thing that will definitely happen because everyone will

approve taking out highway lanes. I kind of like the idea though of like one of those like those machines that kind of zipper that can change the directions of the lanes like we have on the the Walt women bridge and Philly. I kind of like that. But for rail, just like one machine comes docking or like just knocking all the cars. Yeah, this is trade now.

Like this is twice a day direction. You gotta learn to leave a little earlier. This can be it. We don't know. Just some red lights start flashing. It's like Lane is now Lane is now railway. This is now the train lane train is coming for you. Beat beat.

And, you know, as a result of this, all right, they got this fancy new bridge which has an absurd number of lanes. I think it's 10 lanes on the bridge, but six lanes on the highways that approach it. Yeah, and it looks like the villages and South Florida. Yeah. You know, the interstate still dumps thousands of cars and trucks on Minneapolis's streets that contributes to pollution, general lower quality

of life, occupies thousands of acres of valuable downtown real estate. But, you know, that's a small price to pay to for easy access to the US Bank Stadium, however many games the Vikings play every year there. Like eight. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about the 2018 NFC Championship game. All right.

Yeah, let's do that. So the Vikings come in fresh off the Minneapolis miracle where they blow a massive lead to the New Orleans Saints, right? And on the very last play of the game, there's this heroic catch by Stefan Diggs, he manages to keep his footing, basically hurdles the safety, scores a touchdown, gets real good, feel good shit. This is the last joy the Minnesota Vikings are going to experience this year. All right.

So they come to Philly and this is the season the Eagles basically couldn't lose. Minnesota goes up 7-0 on their first possession. With the passes of Kyle Rudolph, the Eagles have to punt and everyone's feeling dejected and sad. And then the Eagles just go like just out of their minds. They go up like 24 to 7 at halftime. There's a flea flicker less than five minutes into the second half.

The link runs out of fireworks because the Eagles were scoring so much. The Eagles end the game 38-7. They win it. They beat my beloved New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. Shut the fuck up. The Vikings had two drives in the fourth quarter, which is actually my favorite part of that. And the best part was that before before the game itself, there were a bunch

of Minnesota fans who came to Philly and were like posing on the Art Museum steps or the Rocky steps, if you're a moron and being like, oh, yeah, we're going to we're going to win. We're going to beat the Eagles. And then they all had to go home, mortified and dejected. And then the Super Bowl was played at US Bank Stadium, which normally kills birds, but not today. I will.

I will. When we when we post this, so we can do the powerpoint. My girlfriend was actually at that NFC championship game. And there's terrific video from people just like leaving in shame. And honestly, the pregame like Vikings fans walking into the link looks like a war zone. Like they're just getting pelted with beer, like getting screamed at in that video that we played the clip of where the drunk Delco kid is

out of his mind screaming go birds. You can hear that woman like trying to argue with him. And it's just like, y'all aren't from around here, huh? That kid is the drunkest looking human I've seen outside of Russia in my life. It was so fucking funny too, because these assholes paid the next year. They end up paying like 84 million to fucking Kurt Cousins, who sucks ass. And all he's done is beaten bad teams when he was on a bad team. So they pissed 84 million down the drain.

They got rid of Stefan Diggs. They don't have a fucking future. Vikings suck. Wild suck. Twins suck. Timberwolves suck. Go to hell. It's go birds go birds go birds stick to sports.

Yes. All right. So anyway, that's the story of the Interstate 35 West Bridge and how it was the math. It was destroyed by the fact that actually do the math. Actually do the math. Yes. Do do the math please.

Yeah. Yeah. And we got a new segment. Otherwise 40 years from after you don't do the math, the firm that bought your own firm might be sued for slightly inconvenience. Yeah, exactly. Consequences. We love them.

Don't we folks? Yes. So someone reminded me a couple of days ago about the existence of Mike Roe who I hate. Yes. And as a result, I thought we would add a new segment to the podcast with some audience participation. It's called Safety Third.

Right. Shake hands. So, all right. So the idea here is Safety Third, you know, Mike Roe is like all about personal responsibility and should, you know, be in a quarter stone, a safety and all, you know, he shouldn't just be mindlessly following procedures. You have to take personal responsibility for your safety. Right.

So the idea here is we want to hear your stories of unsafe job sites and workplaces, which you were unable to make safer through personal responsibility. Yes. Yeah. This is a tip line in a formal sense. Yeah, exactly. Send in your stories to, well, there's your problem or email. Our email is like what?

Wtypod. Wtypod.com, yeah. Or on Twitter, I think we have open DMs on the podcast account. Did we finally do that? So I should probably finally hit that button. If not, then me or Liam. And tell us your stories. Snitch on your boss.

The least safe thing that you have ever done at a job site or seen in a work site. Leave an audio file if you want even, you know, that'd be cool. That would actually be really helpful, yeah. Don't do anything that'll get you fired. Yeah. If you leave us an audio recording, we'll play it. If you write us something, we will read it and we're going to learn about,

we're going to have a safety brief. We're going to stand up for safety. Yeah, exactly. So I thought, you know, I would start out by offering one of my own unsafe job site stories. All right. Good boy. Good boy.

So this was, you will see on the screen in front of you a machine called a mast climber, right? So you see there's two towers here. Those are called masts. Some of them work on one. This is a modular system, right? So these are two individual platforms that are linked together, right? Yes.

So the first time I was on a mast climber, it was not. This rinky dink three story situation here. This one went up about 30 stories. So I got there. I had no training on any kind of heights whatsoever, except don't walk backwards. So don't drop a wrench. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, you know, I'd rather I'm, I'm, I'm mostly concerned with myself

not falling off, right? Cause I at least gave me like the safety harness stuff, you know, but, uh, you know, think about these, these full safety harnesses is, you know, you get the the way to harness goes around right around the top of your legs. You know, if you, if you fall off, you have a strong chance of getting forced feminized. It's a small price to pay. And also in other news, I'm applying for construction jobs working at high.

So I was on a building. It was in center city, Philadelphia that I was working on, right? So this is an older, older skyscraper, right? It's the first two floors, you know, the building occupies the whole lot. But on the third floor, the light well started, right? So it was more of a U shape. The mass climber was on the back of the building, right? And we had to go up the whole building.

Now, usually on a mass climber, if it's right up against the facade of the building, there'll be railings along three sides. And the fourth side, obviously that's the facade. So you can't like fall there. I see where this is going already. Well, for ours, there was no fence around this void. Now, what there was is there was some netting that was blocking off the light well here. I'm not exactly sure why it was there.

I couldn't figure out what it was doing. This building had been abandoned for some decades when we got there. They just started it was blocking off the light well, like level with the facade or like horizontally. Yeah, level with the facade. Yeah, I see. Okay. There's a big net that went up 30 stories.

And but the thing is, you know, we had to do an inspection of the light well itself. So that meant basically you had to lean over and cut a hole in the net to see through. Nope. So you could figure out what was going on in the light well, right? Nope, nope, nope. So now there were there were three of us, four of us on there. There were two guys from the construction company.

There was myself and my boss. And the two guys from the construction company were the people who were leaning over the side of the platform. Thank God. To the worker. Yeah. So but the thing is we went up 30 stories in this thing and the way these are supposed to work, right?

You know, when you link two platforms together, the motors are supposed to work in tandem, right? And also these motors have one speed. They go up at one speed, they go down at one speed. Our problem was the two platforms, the two motors. They both had one speed, but they were two different speeds. Nice. You have a slip death.

Oh, yeah, we'd go up about 10 stories and one side would be about one and a half stories lagging behind. They had to wait a bit for it to catch up and then we'd go back up again, you know, until it was go. It was so far behind that, you know, I can't imagine how much torque this was putting on the on the masts, which of course, you know, these are just flimsy little steel structures that are braced into the side of the building every three floors or so.

We're sure it's fine. So it it was it was an interesting experience. I couldn't imagine a situation where my personal responsibility could have made this situation more safe. When you know, there's this this completely busted piece of equipment that I now have to go 300 feet up in the air in and and my boss thinks it's fine. Should have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. Yeah, she she she.

Well, she she didn't care about heights like ever. It was astonishing. I was like, I can't believe you do the things you do. And then I was like, I can't believe the things I'm expected to do. That was one of the reasons I quit. I'm going to go make podcasts. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to go make YouTube.

Fuck this shit very rarely in the making of a city skylines YouTube video. Yeah, exactly. So I never did go on a swing stage. That would have been the weird one. But yeah, that was my that was my story of going on the busted mast climber, which was, you know, threatening at any time to just, you know, I don't know, rip one of the towers it was attached to down just through sheer sheer torque.

Yeah, or you just, you know, fall into the into the light well. It's just these two guys since they had to operate the motors individually. They had to communicate by just yelling at each other down this 80 90 foot long platform because this platform was a lot longer than one you're seeing in the picture here. I also couldn't figure out why we had hard hats. Because nothing was exactly like nothing's going to hit me from above. There's also like a bunch of crap on the platform, like a bunch of like

just steel beams just sitting there. That might be why one of the motor with motors was struggling. Just just throw them off. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Just shove this this eight foot long wide flange beam like right off the side on the market street. So yeah. That's safety thirds.

That's safety third. Yeah, that's my safety story. We want your stories of how personal responsibility is something which makes a difference in the workplace. Hey, tell us your stories. Yes, exactly. All right. Send it.

We want to hear the really grizzly stuff. Tell us about like fucking like a tendrils of molten steel getting whipped at people. Tell us about like ladders balanced on three other ladders. Don't don't send any gore pics. I won't look at them. I'm not going to look at I'm not going to put them on the screen. I don't want to see any nasty gore or shit like that.

The important thing is you have to have lived to tell us the story. So it can't be too bad. Well, it can be bad. All right. So that was that was safety third. I'm on to you. Next episode is about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right.

And I'm not in this slide. We're back to normal. Thank God. Yes. Alice only did it sometimes. Yeah, that's right. The rest of the time, Mothman. Some of the time there'll be a Mothman in the slide.

You won't even know. I swear to God, the beer episode will be out soon. I I just had a couple long. We were so drunk. It was it's been an issue. So yeah, I'm sorry. That's very late. It'll be out this month.

I hope although this might go out on August 1st to coincide with the I-35 West do Higgy. So also, yes, we know about the numbering. Yes, it is on purpose. Yeah, yeah, it is on purpose. It's to make you mad. Yes. All right.

Anyone got any commercials before we go? No. Okay. Bye everybody. Yeah, bye. That's easy enough. All right. Off you to Zen.